You know the wheels really have come off the climate bandwagon when you get blatantly unscientific nonsense statements like the howler below from ‘Real Climate’s’ Gavin Schmidt. (Hat tip: Malcolm Roberts).

Self-styled climate expert, Schmidt has sought to explain how advocates of the greenhouse gas theory can ‘calculate’ that a benign minor trace gas, carbon dioxide, can lead to runaway global warming due to its alleged superior radiant properties. Here’s how Schmidt works the numbers:

"The factor of two for A (the radiation emitted from the atmosphere) comes in because the atmosphere radiates both up and down." – Gavin Schmidt

Up and down? You mean – unlike other gases- but why no side to side and then shake it all about,too, Gavin? But no, as Schmidt would have you believe it’s just that two times – for the ‘up’ and the ‘down’- the crucial factor of two that sets this greenhouse gas apart from others and allows junk theorists to multiply their dodginess.

How’s that for contravening the First Law of Thermodynamics? Why pause to think, it’s so easy to say. Did you get that all you atmospheric scientists out there?

This and other gems are cogently exposed in a discerning article authored by American radio-chemist, Alan Siddons, entitled‘The Greenhouse Hustle’

Siddons applies useful graphic representations to prove that, “Only to the extent that it absorbs energy can a CO2 molecule be a source of heat – and since its frequency response is limited, so too is its ability to heat. CO2 fails to intercept anything close to the full span of the earth’s radiant spectrum.”

Thanks to the enlightened insight of a more credible climate researcher such as Siddons the blogosphere is becoming an increasingly uncomfortable stomping ground for snake oil peddlers such as ‘Real Climate’s’ Gavin Schmidt.